The AP Queue (Invoice Workflow)
Work bills through DocuClipper's accounts-payable queue: Inbox, Exceptions, Approved, and Paid tabs, per-invoice missing-field flags, and paid-status sync from QuickBooks Online and Xero.
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The AP queue is a workflow view of every payable in a project, organized into the stages a bill actually moves through — from arrival, to clean-up, to approval, to paid. Instead of scanning a flat list, you triage from a prioritized inbox that surfaces the invoices that need attention first and quietly tracks the ones that are already done.
Opening the queue
Open a project that contains invoices and switch to the AP queue / workflow view. Bills are grouped into tabs:
| Tab | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Inbox | The default working view — bills that have arrived and still need review, classification, or approval. |
| Exceptions | Bills with a problem that blocks clean processing: a missing required field, a sync error, a possible duplicate, or a failed PO / bank match. |
| Approved | Bills that have cleared the approval workflow and are ready to pay. |
| Paid | Bills DocuClipper has confirmed were paid in your accounting system (see Paid-status sync below). |
Each row is sorted so the items that need you come first: anything with an issue floats to the top, then overdue bills, then by amount.
Per-invoice flags
Every bill in the queue carries a set of flags that tell you at a glance what (if anything) is wrong. DocuClipper computes these granularly so you can act on the exact gap rather than re-opening the invoice to hunt for it:
- Missing vendor — no vendor/supplier set.
- Missing invoice number — the invoice/reference number is blank.
- Missing amount — the total is zero or empty.
- Missing due date — no due date, so the bill can't age correctly.
- Sync error — the last push to QuickBooks or Xero failed.
- Duplicate — flagged as a possible duplicate.
- PO mismatch / bank mismatch — shown when PO matching or bank-transaction matching is enabled for the project and the bill didn't match.
Bills with any of these land in Exceptions. The missing-field flags are exactly the fields that pre-flight validation requires before a sync, so clearing them in the queue means the bill will export cleanly. See QuickBooks & Xero two-way sync.
The workflow status shown on each row rolls these signals up into one label: Needs review, Pending approval, Approved, Synced, or Paid.
Paid-status sync from QuickBooks Online and Xero
DocuClipper tracks whether each bill has actually been paid in your accounting system, so the Paid tab reflects reality without you marking anything by hand.
How it works:
- The check runs lazily — DocuClipper refreshes paid status when you view the queue, not on a constant background poll, so it only spends an API call when you're actually looking.
- It looks up the still-unpaid bills and invoices in QuickBooks and Xero in batches. A bill counts as paid when Xero reports its status as PAID (or amount due of 0), or when QuickBooks reports a remaining balance of 0.
- Once a bill is confirmed paid, the paid date is stamped on the record permanently, so it drops out of the "needs checking" set and the lookups get cheaper over time.
- Refreshes are throttled to about once every five minutes per project, so opening and closing the queue repeatedly won't hammer the connection.
A confirmed-paid bill moves to the Paid tab and stops appearing in your working inbox and AP aging.